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ekran writes "A while ago Opera Software needed more servers. Not just a few servers either — they were planning Opera Mini's growth, implementing Opera Link, and My Opera was also growing quickly.
Most of the major hardware vendors grabbed their specs and came back with offers and sample servers shipped all the way to Oslo for testing. One of the biggest vendors, however, did not do their homework. They shipped the server, but when the Opera sysadmins started up the web-admin interface, they were met with a JavaScript statement that managed to piss off the whole company including the CTO. The script, apparently, locked out the Opera web-browser."

"since they are insignificant in the browser market I'd probably do the same thing. This is a lame piece of news, companies blow larger deals on much sillier situations than this. It's just Opera trying to drum up some users." - by sulfide (1382739) on Tuesday July 21, @08:53AM (#28768555)

Not knocking FireFox/Mozilla really, they do a nice product & I've worked with their teams fixing bugs on various sites etc. et al, but... they're NO OPERA, in terms of performance, memory footprint, speed overall consistently, & security vulnerabilities patching (as well as meeting standards, but, here? FF seems to do more pages 'correctly', but, that's a matter of useragent string as a fix usually (report as IE, hassles go away many times), + webpage devs building MOSTLY around IE &/or FireFox instead)...

It keeps Opera's competition on their toes, so-to-speak - they "steal" ideas from Opera, rampantly, & yes FireFox has surpassed Opera in javascript parsing + processing speeds lately, but, that same "gain" turned up a loss in the next url below (1st one):

That anyone, with ANY SENSE, that is, knows which webbrowser not only performs the best, pound for pound, but also which one keeps you safest online (& has features natively "built-in" that other webbrowsers have to use addons for, or imitate, to achieve the same levels of excellence in 1 package)...

APK

P.S.=> Lastly, considering Opera generally makes passing the "ACID tests" (for browser std.s compliance) a snap usually, & they are usually the first OR amongst the first that pass it? Well... to quote Microsoft? "Where do YOU want to go, today?"... Opera! apk

But it's worse than that. The unnamed company specifically sent these test servers to Opera. I can sorta understand a bone-headed company deciding it would not bother supporting a minority browser like Opera... but it is then silly to bid on a contract with that minority player, and it takes colossal idiocy to ship a server that doesn't even work with that company's software.

48V DC is an odd beast, with odd standards going back to the early days of the Bell System.

In a 48V DC system, the positive side is grounded. This is to prevent corrosion on phone lines in the ground that happens more readily if the system is negative ground.

Since positive is ground, the "live" wire is negative, or -48VDC. Since this is the wire you don't want to lick, or allow to touch the chassis when powered, it is colored red in many deployments. The black wire is ground, you can lick* it all you want.

* -48V DC won't really sting you much if you just touch it unless your hands are wet or you touch it with a wet part of you like your tongue.

A bit of exploration gives one possibility. This page, on Dell DRACs [dell.com] , which have a web interface, shows that the web interface supports really only IE and firefox, and those only on 32 bit machines.

(a) you can kill yourself with 48V if you're unlucky. It is very unlikely, anything below 60V is considered to be "safety extra low voltage" or SELV, but it's possible to induce fibrillation.

(b)If deploying a system like this, IEC says the positive wire should be BLUE and the negative should be GREY. If the wires are completely isolated (i.e. neither is grounded or connected to PE) the positive wire should be BROWN. In the US (Opera isn't in the US) the wiring convention is WHITE for the return and BLACK for the negative wire. Just DON'T ever use red and black and reverse their normal functions. 48V can make very impressive arcs.

anyone that is using Opera can just switch over to another browser to perform the task at hand*.

Except Opera has a significant exclusive presence on appliances. For instance, I don't know of any other web browser that can be installed on a Wii or Nintendo DS system without a jailbreak, and there are plenty of phones for which Opera Mini or Opera Mobile is the best web browser. Or was this your * ?

If it is intentional, then my question becomes as follows: Why would a reasonable site owner only want to support Firefox?

You're assuming "reasonable."

The thought process (if it may be dignified with such a term) goes something like this, I suspect. These are sites which, until fairly recently, only supported IE. The developers only ever use IE, it's all they know, and they don't really want to know about anything else. As far as they're concerned, the big blue E is the internet. Yes, there are Windows web developers who think like this. Lots of them.

But there's this weird "Firefox" thing they've heard about, it's too popular for them to ignore completely, so they'll grudgingly kinda-sorta support it. If Firefox users are very lucky, the developers may have a little-used copy of Firefox on their machines which they will use to skim through the site after it's been built using IE. And if it looks okay, then they can say, "We support Firefox too!"

Anything else is just beyond their ken. Rendering engine? Gecko? KHTML? What the hell are those? Look, we made our site work for you weirdos who don't want to just use the big blue E like everyone else does. Get off our backs. Jeez.

Some of their ethernet switches block non-IE browsers as well. I forget which is which, but I think the PowerConnect 6000s warn about the browser but let you through, and the 5000s just refuse to let you in when running firefox on linux.My experience is from a few years ago and perhaps they have fixed their firmware since then, I know I filed a complaint.

Browser detection is almost always the wrong way to do things anyway. Test for existence of specific JavaScript properties/methods on objects to find out if they exist. You can generally check for IE-specific behavior just by testing for the presence or absence of JavaScript properties/methods.

By doing this, you won't have to do a browser check at all and your page will "just work" for any browser that implements either the standards-compliant behavior, the IE behavior, or both. You can do the same thing for CSS properties by trying to add the property, then going and trying to read it back for verification. If it isn't there when you go back and check for it, the browser doesn't support the CSS property.

I'm not familiar with Opera's behavior, but in my experience, roughly 99.5% of CSS and JavaScript that works with FireFox also works with Safari and vice versa (as long as you don't try to use bleeding edge HTML5 or CSS3 features). Any browser check that only tests for FireFox is almost always just guaranteed to make a bunch of users mad for no reason.

Opera is only insignificant in U.S. and Asia. It's much more noticeable in Europe in general, and very prominent in Eastern Europe and especially in ex-USSR / CIS countries [opera.com], topping at about 40% there (and yes, it does overtake Firefox there). Which is still a fairly large market - you might not care about it, but for a lot of companies, it would be silly to ignore it.

Opera web site is actually a pretty impressive piece of code. It has all that nifty stuff like drop-down menus, and yet it also renders perfectly in Lynx (with menus as lists) - disable CSS and JavaScript in your browser, and you'll see. Meanwhile, it validates to XHTML 1.0 Strict [w3.org].

It shouldn't be surprising, however, given that Opera guys are pretty keen on all Web-related standardization efforts - they've played a big role in initiating HTML5 effort (and are still very active in its development), before that they've participated in past W3C HTML/CSS standardization efforts, and they push for open standards (such as SVG) otherwise.